TRADITIONAL, NOT CONVENTIONAL.

The Medical Mafia (April 22, 2014)

This is a delightful term that is commonly used to refer to the collusion between the AMA, FDA and Big Pharma. It’s particularly used when discussing the coercion (financial and otherwise) used in the service of the self-interest of this cartel versus what is good for the people that it is supposed to be serving, and especially it is used when we are talking about alternatives to conventional treatment. Using this term does NOT mean you are some kind of airy-fairy sunlight-and-rainwater type who thinks everything about conventional medicine is bad. It does mean that you are aware that there are powerful bureaucratic forces present in modern-day health care that are operating for their own benefit.

Evidence-based medicine, incidentally, is something that has been fought by the medical mafia since its inception. EBM slowly coming into its own is one of the most positive things about health care today.

“Medical mafia” is a whole lot easier to say than “the corrupt bureaucracy of modern medicine as it is practiced in the U.S. in the 21st century”. It is important for us to remember that:

no matter what products or services a business provides, the first rule of ANY business is to make money;

the bigger a business is, the farther removed it is from its customers and thus the less accountable it is to them; and

the government entities that work with this particular business do so more often than not with the welfare of that business as their primary concern.